In our earlier blogs, we had described how to build and deploy BOSH and how to build and deploy cf-release on OpenPOWER systems, an alternative processor architecture based on IBM POWER systems. In this blog, we will describe how to build and deploy the Concourse continuous integration service as a BOSH release to OpenStack on OpenPOWER systems. Concourse installation steps with BOSH documented here need just OpenPOWER specific releases and resources to deploy on OpenPOWER. We are providing a base Concourse release which contains four resources – git-resource, time-resource, archive-resource and docker-image-resource as Docker images. The list of supported resources and additional custom resource types can be built using Concourse pipelines.

At the 2015 Minds + Machines conference in San Francisco, GE announced that its Predix platform – the first PaaS built specifically for industry – was open for general availability. We chatted with Jeff Barrows, Cloud Platform Engineering Manager at GE Digital, to get his perspective on this transformation initiative. Don’t miss Jeff’s presentation at Cloud Foundry Summit 2016.
Jeff Barrows, Cloud Platform Engineering Manager at GE Digital
How did you get involved in Pivotal Cloud Foundry?
When I first joined GE, we were using a traditional three-tier web application deployment model—I designed Chef-based mechanisms to help developers deploy their Predix-based apps to the cloud using AWS or vSphere.

Unlike most movie sequels, software tends to get better with each new version. This afternoon, Microsoft announced the sequel to its April premier of Cloud Foundry on Azure. Dubbed Cloud Foundry on Azure Preview 2, this newest Microsoft contribution to the Cloud Foundry ecosystem incorporates months of community feedback and new Cloud Foundry technologies.
With these new updates, customers will be able to deploy a standard Cloud Foundry infrastructure on Azure using Bosh-Init.
You can watch the trailer for Cloud Foundry on Azure Preview 2 below:

For more information, head over to the BOSH Azure CPI github repo.

A number of great resources to help you on your Cloud Foundry journey hit the intertubes this week. Among them:

A step-by-step guide to using BOSH
A helpful list of ways to get started with Cloud Foundry
An insightful talk about Cloud Foundry, cloud native and the continuous innovation movement given by Cloud Foundry CEO Sam Ramji at OSCON. You can grab Sam’s slides here and watch the video below:

And in case you missed it, Cloud Foundry Foundation members HP and ActiveState created quite the stir this week, too.

Foundation Update
Chip Childers was on vacation this week, so Chris Ferris from IBM gave an update from the perspective of the Foundation’s Board. There was a Board meeting the week prior that was unfortunately compromised by a NYC stock market shutdown and grounded flights. Due to this they didn’t accomplish every they wanted, but they did talk about the upcoming conferences. There will be a CFP (call for participation) going out soon. Chris said the Foundation is currently getting ready for the OSCON conference for which Cloud Foundry is a silver sponsor. For Cloud Foundry, they are planning two mini CF Summits – one is Europe (potentially Berlin in October) and one in China (potentially in Shanghai in mid-November).

AWS, Google and Azure are in a price war; and seem committed to matching on-demand prices. That is good, but not the whole story.
The under reported price is that of the AWS spot market; which can be up to 10 x cheaper than on-demand prices.

Instance Type
On-demand / month
Spot / month

m3.medium
$56
$7

m2.xlarge
$200
$14

r3.xlarge
$358
$29

There are only 2 differences between AWS spot and on-demand instances.
1. Spot instances take longer to start (5 min vs 1 min)
2. Spot instances “fail” more frequently; when spot prices move above your bid price your instance gets terminated.
You might think that ( 2 ) would prevent you from using spot to host “always on” services like Cloud Foundry.
However:
1.

First a little background, and then a story. As Matt described here, Cloud Foundry BOSH has a great capability to perform rolling updates automatically to an entire set of servers in a cluster, and there is a defensive aspect to this feature called a “canary” that is at the center of this tale. When a whole lot of servers are going to be upgraded, BOSH will first try to upgrade a small number of them (usually 1), the “canary”, and only if that is successful will the remaining servers in the cluster be upgraded. If the canary upgrade succeeds, then BOSH will parallelize up to a “max in flight” number of remaining server upgrades until all are completed.
And now the story.
For the last few weeks I’ve been pairing on the Cloud Foundry development team here at Pivotal.

I’ve had the privilege of visiting a few of Pivotal’s early access customers to help them install our Pivotal CF™ PaaS solution, which is powered by Cloud Foundry technology. I’d like to share a recent success story and highlight three benefits from Pivotal CF that were very well received.
This customer, like many we are working with, is in the process of planning a next generation application and data analytics platform focused on PaaS as a strategic centerpiece. We were engaged for a three-day proof of concept (POC) engagement, the focus of which was three-fold:

Install Pivotal CF in a newly created VMware vSphere environment.
Push an application which both ingested and consumed data to/from existing Hadoop and Solr environments.

Cloud Foundry is an Open Platform-as-a-Service, and an Open Source project. It has attracted phenomenal interest from the community – including partners, companies using the code internally, and those individual developers with a passion for getting involved. You can find the source code on Github. Community contributions are what help to make the platform so extensible. We are always happy when we receive a Github pull request to offer new functionality or fixes! We also appreciate bug reports submitted through Github Issues.
Looking at the Cloud Foundry project as a whole though… where should you start?
As you might imagine, there are a lot of moving parts in a PaaS.

The following information is now out of date. For current information on how to deploy to AWS using Cloud Foundry BOSH, please refer to the documentation at http://docs.cloudfoundry.org/deploying/aws/index.html.

Cloud Foundry was designed and built to support distributed applications that can be moved between multiple clouds, including those running on different IaaS infrastructures such as vSphere, vCloud, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services. The key to supporting multiple clouds is BOSH, a cloud deployment and lifecycle management tool that was announced earlier this year.

This blog post will walk you through the steps to start using BOSH on AWS and then show you how to deploy a sample three-tier application.
Read more →